David Myers' breakthrough restaurant is an exquisite Los Angeles space, a serene bubble of luxury and refinement with an endless, nuanced ever-changing tasting menu, which often tends toward the Japanese: cubes of sansho-pepper-scented tuna married to sautéed sweetbreads, passion-fruit cannoli stuffed with peekytoe crab, tiny Nantucket scallops flavored with dates and poppy seeds, or rare duck with red wine and pumpkin seeds toasted to resemble the exact crunch of its skin. Sona is the furthest thing imaginable from the Rabelaisian assault of a brasserie. What we know as California cuisine may be dedicated to revealing produce at its best, but Myers goes after nature with blowtorches and microtomes and dynamite, determined to bend the old woman to her will. The morning after nine courses at Sona (this is one restaurant where only the tasting menu will do), it will already seem like a half-forgotten dream.

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